


with no lock

by chainofclovers



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-08 02:09:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14094735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainofclovers/pseuds/chainofclovers
Summary: There’s no backing off once you’ve clung that hard.





	with no lock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kathryne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne/gifts).



> This is a little thing for the wonderful K, who threw out some prompts that included: sex, snuggles, a freshly made bed, and (yay!) #grace hanson hates poetry #but maybe not as much as she used to
> 
> I know you wanted mushy and silly, too, but as per usual when I spend more than 2 seconds thinking about Grace Hanson, the Grace in my head was like "I see your request for silliness and can I just steer you in the direction of SUPER INTENSE FEELINGS instead?" Hope you enjoy all the same, and can maybe see some silliness if you squint?
> 
> The title and the quoted lines of poetry are both from the absolutely brilliant ["Floating Trees"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47844/floating-trees) by the great C.D. Wright.

Even after Grace and Frankie are settled in their new house, there’s something animal about the way they huddle together. The same house isn’t enough. The same room isn’t enough. They’ve tried apart, they’ve tried friends-but-antagonists, they’ve tried allies-but-seeing-other-people, they’ve tried on-the-run and scared and clinging. There isn’t a force in the world, legal or emotional or otherwise, that can take this house away from them, but there’s no backing off once you’ve clung that hard, once you’ve learned to ignore the changing collection of roofs and walls and seek shelter in a body. It isn’t enough to buy a house, to sit next to each other and nestle your signatures together on the dozens of closing documents. When Grace wakes up at one or two or three a.m., she needs Frankie less than an arm’s length away, needs her like it’s a matter of survival. 

When it’s time to tell people, Grace is frustrated that she can’t email her pleasant but distant brother and say: 

_i’m an animal & i need frankie & that’s what was wrong before, that’s what was always wrong & i’m okay & you’re my brother and i don’t know you but i love you & is it life-or-death with you and laurie, on a skin level, your flesh and bones and her flesh and bones, together like a conclusion & with us it is, life-or-death, life and death_

Or rather, she could, but she won’t. Among other things, she types _Guess what, I’m a lesbian_ , which, if differently evocative, is as true as the message left untyped in her head. There’s value, she supposes, in translating the news into more universally human terms. For instance: the email doesn’t smell like freshly-laundered sheets. Add sweat. Add salt. Add tenderness, metallic and sweet in her mouth. 

Over the course of a week, Grace and her brother exchange a few messages, and she acquiesces to the narrative—to the charming, the ironic. _Yes, Frankie Bergstein! Sol’s ex! My roommate!_

(It isn’t irony, this path she’s chosen, the key word being _chosen_. It takes a lot of work to arrive at an inevitability. In a cold environment, molecules slow down, draw closer. There’s a way to get through the world’s disinterest: move in together, tangle your signatures, crawl to the source of heat.)

Two days past Grace’s birthday—and after decades of postcards, then eCards, five-minute Merry Christmases, silence for most of the year—a package arrives. It’s a book of poetry. On the title page, her brother has written Grace's birthdate and scrawled _One of my faves! Happy birthday, and best wishes for a wonderful year._ His handwriting, slanted and thin, has aged since last she saw it. 

“Now that I’m an actual lesbian, I’m supposed to like poetry?” she complains to Frankie. “I hate poetry.” She likes what the school librarian called Realistic Fiction. You look in on a made-up person, eat your way through a slice of their life, and then it ends, and they live on only in your imagination, which fades. She puts the poetry on her nightstand to be polite, though she buries it under her current novel. Puts a thank you note in the mail that weekend.

The book’s been in the house a couple weeks, has lived under three different novels in that time, when one night Frankie reaches over her in bed and plucks it from the stack. “I just remembered we never looked at this,” she says. A few minutes later: “This is great.” Grace tries to focus on her own reading, but she spends most of her awareness on observing Frankie. Frankie's not reading in order. She flips back and forth between pages. “Oh, God,” she says after she’s been on one page for a while. “Grace, you have to hear this.” 

“I don’t get poetry,” Grace admits, a preemption. She scoots a little closer to Frankie in bed, rests her hand on her forearm. “It goes by too quickly.” It’s too messy, full of codes she runs out of time to crack. No footholds, which makes her angry. She can do anything if she has a foothold.

“Well, don’t _try_ to get it,” Frankie says, as if this is obvious. “Just find a part that sounds good, and you’ll know what it means.” She clears her throat, primly announces the title. “‘Floating Trees.’” Frankie has a good voice, and their house is old and sturdy and runs cool, and the litany of images settles around them, as messy as Grace feared. 

Then: “the room he brings into you / the room befalls you // like the fir trees he trues her / she nears him like the firs...” 

Grace squeezes Frankie’s arm, signaling that this is her part, this is the good sound. She barely notices when the poem ends. The lines repeat within her, the pronouns crumble to dust, and it turns out you can fuck a poem, can go inside it, can fit lines in yourself or another person like fingers. It’s just as well she’s already sent the thank you note.

Later, when Frankie fucks her for real, Grace imagines that an orgasm is a room, a room within the room of her body, her body the imperfect home Frankie has chosen, nothing inevitable or ironic about this residence they’ve worked to earn, being delicate creatures who require each other’s warmth.


End file.
